NASA: No Shuttle Repairs Needed, Endeavour Safe To Fly Home

HOUSTON, TX. (AP) – A gouge on space shuttle Endeavour’s belly does not need to be repaired in orbit, NASA has decided after several days of testing, analysis and deliberation.

The decision came Thursday night after a five-hour meeting of mission managers. They opted against any risky spacewalk repairs based on the overwhelming – but not unanimous – recommendations of hundreds of engineers. The massive amount of data they gathered indicated Endeavour would suffer no serious structural damage during next week’s re-entry.

For several days, NASA had said crew safety was not at risk. The concern was that the heat of re-entry could weaken the shuttle’s aluminum frame at the damaged spot and result in lengthy post-flight repairs, but testing showed that would not be the case. The gouge is too small to be catastrophic, unlike the damage Columbia suffered.

Ultimately, managers decided they couldn’t justify putting spacewalking astronauts at risk if the vehicle was in acceptable shape as is to make the journey home. A spacewalk earlier this week, cut short by an astronaut’s ripped glove, showed how hazardous even a relatively routine jaunt outside the international space station can be.

“I am 100 percent comfortable that the work that has been done has accurately characterized it (the damage) and that we will have a very successful re-entry,” said John Shannon, chairman of the mission management team. “I am also 100 percent confident that if we would have gotten a different answer and found out that this was something that was going to endanger the lives of the crew, that we had the capability on board to go and repair it and then have a successful entry.”

Johnson Space Center’s engineering group in Houston wanted to proceed with the repairs. But everyone else, including safety officials, voted to skip them. The thermal shielding on Endeavour’s belly was pierced by a piece of debris that broke off the external fuel tank shortly after liftoff Aug. 8. The debris carved out a 3-inch-long, 2-inch-wide gouge and dug all the way through the thermal tiles.

Left completely exposed was a narrow 1-inch strip of the overlying felt fabric, the last barrier before the shuttle’s aluminum structure. The only way to fix the gouge would have been to send a pair of spacewalkers out with black protective paint and caulk-like goo, and maneuver them beneath the shuttle on the end of a 100-foot robotic arm and extension boom, with few if any close-up camera views of the work.

A Nobel Prize-winning physicist who served on the Columbia investigation board four years ago, Stanford University’s Douglas Osheroff, questioned NASA’s hesitancy to perform the repairs since they “can only increase their chances of making it down.” I don’t see why NASA is going to invent a fix and not use it,” Osheroff said before Thursday night’s decision. He added: “This attitude of, `It looks like it’s OK, let’s not do anything about it,’ it seems like the Columbia NASA.”

Osheroff said it’s imperative that the decision be made by NASA’s upper management, not just left with the shuttle mission management team, which occurred during Columbia. The mission management team did make the final decision on Endeavour, although NASA administrator Michael Griffin and chief of safety officer Bryan O’Connor listened in on Thursday’s meeting, Shannon said.

Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA’s space operations chief, participated in an earlier discussion. The Endeavour crew woke up Friday to pop hit “Black Horse & The Cherry Tree” by KT Tunstall. It is more than halfway through its two-week mission to the space station. The astronauts have successfully completed their main tasks, including attaching a new truss segment to the station and replacing a gyroscope that helps control the station’s orientation.

Crew member and teacher-astronaut Barbara Morgan – who was Christa McAuliffe’s backup on the Challenger mission – spoke to children in Idaho and Virginia during events this week, fulfilling a decades-old dream of an educator turning the space shuttle into a classroom. NASA was keeping an eye on Hurricane Dean and planned to discuss on Friday where to relocate Johnson Space Center employees if they need to evacuate.

By RASHA MADKOUR Associated Press Writer

Associated Press writers Marcia Dunn in Cape Canaveral, Fla., and Seth Borenstein in Washington contributed to this report.